Shadows (Ashes Trilogy 2)

“She’s gone!” Tori wailed, as Sarah, their third housemate, crowded into the room. “So is Alex!”

“Relax. Alex probably didn’t come back from the hospice, that’s all,” Lena said, shucking her nightgown. Her skin pebbled with gooseflesh and she shivered. Why was it so cold?

“No, no.” Tori shook her head in a vigorous negative. “Her door’s open, but her bed’s still made and—”

“Come on,” Sarah said, as Lena shrugged into a sweatshirt. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”

In the kitchen, there were two guards, one bearded and one not, in winter whites. Through the window, Lena spied a third— she thought his name was John—staggering up the side steps.

With a body.

“Oh my God.” Lena’s heart catapulted into her mouth as John ducked inside on a pillow of bitter air. Chris was draped over the guard’s shoulders, and as John staggered across the kitchen, blood drizzled from the boy’s hair to ink the floor in thick, scarlet coins.

“Where can I put him?” John was sweating so much, steam curled from his head.

“This way.” Sarah threw open the wide double doors between the kitchen and Jess’s sitting room. Lurching after, John stooped to ease Chris off his shoulders and onto a couch. “Watch it, watch it,” John chanted as Chris’s weight shifted and his body slid to one side. “Don’t let him—”

“I’ve got him,” Lena said, cradling Chris’s head. His hair was tacky, and she felt the blood squelch between her fingers as she applied pressure. The smudged hollows of his eyes were brown as coffee while his lips were glassy, nearly transparent. A red tongue of blood slicked the right side of his face and dribbled down his neck, and at the sight, she felt her unruly stomach do another slow roll. “What happened?”

“Got kicked in the head.” John was puffing. A large splash of Chris’s blood stained the guard’s shoulders crimson. “Night shied and threw him, and then she let fly. Jess’s hurt, too.”

“What?” Sarah and Lena said at the same time. “How?” Lena asked.

“John, we got to go,” the bearded guard cut in. “We got to get Doc and we got to do it fast before—”

“Just call him on your radio,” Lena said. The battery-powered radios were pre-sixties relics, used sparingly and only in true emergencies, but this surely qualified. She nodded toward the bulky, olive-green handset clipped to John’s belt. “Kincaid could be here in—”

“Can’t do that,” the other guard warned. “Everyone’ll—”

“You think I don’t know that?” John snapped.

“What are you talking about?” Lena asked at the same time that Tori said, “I don’t understand. Why not use your radio?”

John ignored them both. “Nathan’s coming,” he said to the guards. “Someone’s also got to get Jess’s horse.”

“I’m on it,” the bearded guard said.

“Jess was out riding?” Lena said. “Now? It’s freezing.”

“All right, come on,” John said. He hurried from the room, the guards a step behind.

“Hey, wait a minute.” All Lena knew about head injuries was that they were bad, and Chris was still bleeding. “Chris needs a doctor!”

“And we’ll get him. Just hold tight. We’ll be ba—” But whatever else John said was hacked off by the slam of the kitchen door.

“Hold tight?” Tori echoed.

“It’s all we can do,” Sarah tossed over her shoulder as she ducked back into the kitchen. “Lena, don’t let up that pressure. I’ll be right back. Tori, get a fire started in here.”

“This is just wrong,” Lena said. Through the front window, she watched the men boost onto their horses. John’s rifle hung in a bright red scabbard secured to the off-side of a dapple gray, while each guard’s crossbow was fitted to a scabbard off-side and just behind the cantle. The men thundered off toward the woods, leaving Night, Chris’s blood bay, prancing on his tether.

“Wait,” Tori said. She hadn’t made a move toward the hearth. “Aren’t those archers?”

“Yeah,” Lena said—and that was very weird. The archers monitored the woods edging the Zone, which lay southwest of the village. So if the archers were here, did that mean Chris had been out there?

“Why would Chris be in the Zone? No one’s allowed out there,” Tori wondered aloud, echoing Lena’s thoughts. “The supply party was headed for Wisconsin, and that’s a straight shot west. Last I heard, they’re not due back for a couple days.”

“I don’t know.” Lena felt the slow, insistent leak of Chris’s warm blood through her fingers. Where was Sarah with those towels? “I guess Chris got back early.”

“But why would he go through the Zone?” Tori persisted. “He’s got to know that the guards would never allow him back into the village if he came that way.”

“Maybe he didn’t come that way,” Lena said.

“But then what?” Tori pressed.

“I don’t know,” Lena said again, and then looked over as Sarah bustled up with dish towels. “Do you understand any of this?”

“No. Here, let up a second,” Sarah said, slipping a balled towel against Chris’s head and then nodding at Lena. “Okay, hold that while I tie it down.”

“One of us has to go for Kincaid,” Lena said as Sarah twisted a second towel and then looped it around Chris’s head in a makeshift bandage.

“No, what we’ve got to do now is tend to Chris,” said Sarah.

“But you don’t need two of us.” Shuddering, Lena smeared her sticky palm on her thigh, painting her jeans with a purple exclamation mark. “I’ll get Kincaid. On Night, I could be there in fifteen, twenty minutes max.”

“I need you here.”

“More than we need a doctor?”

“Yes.” Sarah pushed up from the couch. “We’ve got to strip him down, see if he’s hurt anywhere else. I’ll get some hot water. I filled the reservoir last night, so we—”

“You can’t,” Tori broke in. “There’s no hot water. The stove’s out. That’s why it’s so cold in the house.”

“What?” Sarah stared. “Jess never lets the stove go.”